How to promote academic freedom in America

WHEN SEEKING a job to teach in the University of California system, academic excellence is not enough. Applicants must also submit a diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) statement, explaining how they will advance those goals. That sounds fair enough, except that a promise to treat everyone equally would constitute a fail. Meanwhile in Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis and the state legislature are trying to ban the teaching of critical race theory, an approach to studying racism with which they disagree. While this has been going on, a row has broken out (also in Florida) over a new pre-college course in African-American studies. These three developments have one thing in common: they are attempts to win arguments by controlling the institutions where those arguments take place.

Threats to academic freedom in America can come from many directions. Students sometimes object to being exposed to ideas they deem troubling. Some even try to get faculty members fired for allowing such ideas to be voiced. Donors occasionally threaten to withdraw funding, which has a chilling effect on what can be taught. Speakers can be banned. Academics may self-censor, or succumb to groupthink. Occasionally American society demands restrictions on academic freedom, as when professors in the 1950s were asked to take loyalty tests to prove they were not communist sympathisers.

All these threats still exist. Plenty of people have rightly worried about academic freedom in America in the past. And yet one of the things that is distinctive about this moment is that the warring parties have determined that the best way to win the argument, and the most thorough way to stifle debate, is to remake institutions according to their preferences.

DEI statements may seem innocuous enough, and their intentions may seem laudable. Yet if they are used as a filter for hiring, they will filter out anyone who fails to toe the campus-progressive line, and anyone who objects on principle to ideological litmus tests.

In Florida, Mr DeSantis seems to be hoping that left-wing professors in state colleges will go to work somewhere else, creating openings for more conservative professors. The Stop WOKE Act, now law in Florida, bars teaching about systemic racism unless this is done “in an objective manner”—a qualifier which is rather subjective. Academics who cross the line will be threatened with dismissal.

As for that course on African-American history, a draft version was denounced from the right as dangerous woke nonsense and then, when it was revised, denounced from the left as a whitewashed version of black history. The notion that students might look at contradictory ideas and judge their merits was too terrifying to contemplate.

Partisans on both sides seem indecently eager to create separate institutions for liberals and conservatives, where the liberals would never have to hear wrongthink (a category that would include some of Martin Luther King’s ideas, were they proposed by a less revered speaker), and the conservatives would never have to encounter the works of Derrick Bell (who has as good a claim as anyone to have developed critical race theory).

No doubt this would make both ideological tribes happier. But it would be a disaster for the country. Democracy depends on citizens who can find compromises. Liberalism depends on taking an opponent’s argument seriously and learning from it. America needs institutions that can have these debates, rather than monocultural incubators of mutually exclusive ideologies. DEI statements could even be repurposed to this end: rather than asking applicants what they have done to further racial diversity and equity, institutions of higher learning might start asking how they plan to further real diversity of thought. ■